breath, life, all the same
by Dave-ck
Summary: Kate twitches, her limbs jerking, and Rick's gaze shoots up to search her face but he's met with unseeing eyes, and she's not awake yet, he realises, but stuck somewhere between still.    One-shot. Missing scene. Spoilers for Rise.


**Notes:** Just something I wanted to work through in my head. Comments and concrit always welcome.

Apologies if there are any errors.

**Disclaimer**: Castle belongs to the ABC.

He's staring at her chest.

If she was awake, she'd kill him, but she's not, and that's the entire problem, isn't it?

Her chest rises and falls beneath his gaze and he tries to concentrate on that, because she's _still breathing_. They're deep, even breaths, in a too-steady rhythm set by the respirator but breath, life, all the same.

He knows he should pull his eyes away, but Rick doesn't know where else to look.

He watched her heart monitor for a while, but he kept trying to decipher the trace, to make sense of each dip and rise and twitch in the green line. He didn't understand what the readings meant. It bothered him, in the end, more than it comforted him, and he hated that he couldn't decipher the code, couldn't read the life or death of her in the twisted language hidden in the numbers at the bottom of each screen.

There wasn't an alarm – he'd been there for one of those – and that was good, but the pattern kept changing, the rhythm unsteady, and he didn't know if that was good or bad and he found his hope dying with each uneven beat of her heart.

He'd like to be able to look at her face, but the sight of the tube down her throat – the one breathing for her – breaks something inside of him. He'd stared for a while, hoping to find her watching him back, but whenever she does open her eyes, they're a glassy green, unfocused, and not at all the clear, crisp gaze of the woman he knows.

Rick strokes the pad of his thumb along the back of her forearm, careful of the needles in the back of her hand, the leads attached to her skin.

She feels feverish, but they tell him not to worry; her system is working off the drugs. She's healing. It's natural.

The nurse tells him that she has to wake up on her own. That it's a process.

That it's normal.

But they've just dug a round out of her chest, just patched her up as best they could, and there's nothing natural about the situation.

Kate twitches, her limbs jerking, and Rick's gaze shoots up to search her face but he's met with unseeing eyes, and she's not awake yet, he realises, but stuck somewhere between still.

"It's okay, Beckett," he says, moving closer to her.

He keeps his voice low, soothing. "It's okay, I'm right here. You're fine. You're safe."

He doesn't know what she's remembering, what horrors are flashing through her mind, but he can see the panic etched across her face. She starts to choke, then, and he has to reach across her body to grab her free hand as her heart rate spikes in his ears.

He's holding her down with his torso, feeling her thrash against him, but they'll restrain her if she tries to rip the breathing tube out again and this is better, surely.

There are tears gathering in her eyes as she struggles to breathe and Rick's heart breaks right along beside hers.

"Don't fight the machine, Beckett. It's helping you."

Her gaze settles on him, then, and it's still unfocused, but less so.

Keep talking, he thinks, and so he does. "I've got your back, remember? Trust me, Kate. I won't let anything happen to you." He doesn't know how to continue, though, and in the end, he tells her, "You're fine."

"I'm here."

And, "Just breathe."

And it's not the most eloquent he's been, but it seems to work, and he repeats the phrases, over and over, mixes them together with a voice steady and calm and soothing, until the arms in his grip relax and the tears in her eyes fade. She's blinking at him slowly, relaxing back into the mattress. She's fading again but she's stopped fighting and she's breathing and that's good.

That's all he can ask for.

"Get better, Kate," he says, easing his body away from hers once her eyes are fully closed. And then, "Please," because she died in his arms once already.

"Mr. Castle?"

Rick's head snaps around and he jerks back towards the uncomfortable chair beside Kate's bed, but it's only the nurse. The one who'd let him in.

"She was fidgeting again," he says though she asks him for no explanation.

The nurse – Kathy, he notes – smiles at him gently. "I'm sorry, Mr. Castle, but the doctors will be doing their rounds soon. You'll have to leave, I'm afraid."

Rick nods reluctantly. "Of course, thank you."

He doesn't want to leave. He'd spent the afternoon at the precinct, chasing dead leads, and he'd only arrived after visiting hours. He was lucky he'd been let in at all.

"You should go home and rest," the nurse says, laying a hand on his shoulder. "You'll be no good to her if you're a mess."

"You're right," Rick says, as he stands, because it's what he's supposed to say even though he knows he's no good to her either way.

"You have my number? In case her father can't be reached?"

"Right here." Kathy waves a file at him. "She's recovering well, Mr. Castle. If she keeps going at this rate she'll be awake the next time you visit."

Rick hovers by Kate's bedside, his hand floating a hairs breadth from her skin in case she reacts to his absence. She doesn't and then he's just stalling. They both know it.

"She doesn't like the breathing tube."

"Nobody does."

The nurse is still kind, even as she ushers him out of Kate's room, and Rick wonders at how much patience she must have to be able to do this each day.

"When will you take it out?"

"It's up to her doctor."

Rick casts a look back towards his detective's room. "You'll call me?"

"If anything happens, yes. Now go home."

"She's going to be all right?"

"Honestly?" The nurse pauses. "We'd let you stay if she wasn't."

"So I'm supposed to be grateful I'm being kicked out?"

A hand on his back guides him into the corridor. "That's the general idea."

"You'll-"

"We'll call."

"Thank you."

"Go home."

He does.

But he doesn't stay there long. They won't let him sneak back in to see her again, at least, not until the roster has switched to the day shift and there's a new face he can charm.

The guys will still be at the precinct, he knows, and so he heads there because they may have caught a new lead in the time he was away.

He needs to solve this for her. And for him. He needs to end it because it's not just her crusade anymore, it's her life and, so, it's his too.

He'll go back to the hospital when she's awake and they'll talk, or they won't.

Either way, he'll be there, because she's still breathing, still alive, and that's all he could ask for in those last precious moments when she lay bleeding in his arms.

She'll love him back, or she won't.

He can live with either truth as long as she does.


End file.
